Canoa: memoria de un hecho vergonzoso (Canoa: A Shameful Memory). 1976. Mexico. Directed by Felipe Cazals. Screenplay by Tomás Pérez Turrent. With Enrique Lucero, Salvador Sanchez, Ernest Gomez Cruz. 4K digital restoration by Criterion Collection with the supervision of Felipe Cazals; courtesy Janus Films. US premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 115 min.
Released in 1976, only a few years after the events it depicts, Felipe Cazals’s Canoa was the first Mexican film to deal with the political violence and governmental suppression surrounding the Summer Olympics of 1968. But rather than confront that massive upheaval head-on, Cazals and his screenwriter, Tomás Pérez Turrent, instead examine an allegorical part of the whole: the fate of a group of young university employees on a hiking trip, who stop to pass the night in a small town in the state of Puebla, only to become the victims of an anti-Communist mob riled up by a local right-wing priest. A tremendous influence on the young Mexican filmmakers who emerged in the ’90s, including Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, Canoa recalls Fritz Lang’s Fury in its balance of political passion and formal precision. This new restoration from the Criterion Collection was created under the supervision of the director, who died last October.